


With Bells in Her Hair

by semicolonlife



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dothraki, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Future Character Death, Future Fic, Guild of the Faceless Men, Homecoming, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Regret, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:23:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semicolonlife/pseuds/semicolonlife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The further south they travel the more Gendry starts to wonder if he truly knows this woman who wears Arya Stark's face. As he begins to doubt himself more and more, Gendry becomes obsessed with the strange bells she wears in her hair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Working off of the theory that Arya will eventually cross paths with Dany, I was struck by the idea that Arya would take to wearing bells in her hair for each of her kills. And then it grew into this monster.

She reappears as the snows touch the marshes of Dorne and every raven brings word of dragons. Dragons in the east; ice dragons north of the Wall; the young dragon sitting in the Stormlands. She has grown into her long features and, should he ever see her in a silk gown again, she would be the embodiment of the Maiden.

At present, he can only see the Stranger in her gray eyes.

On the night a rogue nicks himself shaving and bleeds out, she takes the newly available room. Gendry recognizes her at once, aged not as he imagined, but unmistakable as his friend from the journey north. A pleasant, bitter-tinged memory he sometimes takes out and examines in the hour of the wolf or when he’s drowning in his cups. 

She feels his gaze on her from across the tables and turns to regard him. Gendry sits back and grips the hatchet at his hip.

In the following days, he sees her giggling with the innkeeper and poring overpriced beer into tankards of other travelers at different times of night. She sneaks into the larder and examines the skeletal horses huddled together in the stable. Each time she resembles the gray-eyed girl he saw the first night. She is an etching a man draws up days after the event or a sister close in age. These flirtatious, cow-eyed girls all share her thin nose and long, dark braid knotted with silver bells, but they are not Arya Stark.

“I know you,” he calls across the yard. It is empty besides themselves. He leans against the side of his armory in breeches and a leather apron. She has yet to inspect his realm or ply him with a mug of beer and a peak at her teats. Today she wears her strange bells and a crooked mouth.

But the stare she fixes him with, _that_ he remembers well from when it was a foot closer to the ground. “You’re mistaken, I’m no one.”

“Yer a highborn lady called Arya Stahgh.”

She is across the yard in an instant with an elbow thrown to his throat and his own hatchet raised against him.

“Still…ughah.” He swallows painfully. “Still quick to temper.”

“Speak of that name again,” she hisses, “and I’ll split your thick skull open."

“Do it, m’lady,” he grits out, pushing against her forearm. 

She checks her grip on the hatchet, hitching her arm higher, then bites her bottom lip. The hatchet’s shaft slips through her fingers, the axe head catching at her knuckles. She holds the weapon at her side.

After a minute she steps back and throws the hatchet down. Gendry massages his neck. “Arya—“

She shakes her head sending the bells dancing. “Don't,” she says. She swipes at her mouth. "Just don’t."

Her mouth is a small frown but her own and Gendry wants to brush his thumb across it. He moves and she is gone quicker than a startled deer.

* * *

It is two days before he sees her again. Any version of her. The Crossroad’s gate cannot be opened without him hearing it from the armory, so he knows she can’t have moved on. This doesn’t stop him from checking with the innkeeper, a slick man who will be lucky to keep his position for another fortnight.

“The miss ain’t gone,” he says. “An' ain’t leavin'. We’ve gone too long without ah proper whore. Her cunt will make us ah - ah good profit, it will.” He squints at Gendry. “Is that why yah askin'? I haven’t set ah price but I’ll tell yah what, yah can have ah go for only four copper pieces.”

Gendry hauls slick Jym off his feet and halfway across the bar. “I don’t pay for cunt.” He drops the keep and trudges back to his forge.

He’s reshaping a breastplate when she enters and doesn’t hear the creak of the door. With a white-hot soldering rod he welds closed a puncture in the left side. He tosses the rod into a bucket of water and turns to get a finer hammer.

"Seven Hells.”

She’s staring up a shelf of helmets, most of them have already been repaired, but a few sit cracked and broken with brains still dried to the sides. “The door wasn’t locked.”

He strikes the repair and sets the metal singing. When he flips the breastplate over, she speaks, her voice sharp.

“Don’t ask after me.”

Gendry throws down his hammer and yanks the bellows from the fire before pulling off his gloves. “Jym thinks you’re a whore.” He rinses his hands in one of the buckets then splashes his face with the dirty water.

"He needs to continue thinking that.” She turns to look at him. “How are you here?”

“Came before the snows started. Haven’t left.” He settles against the anvil, crossing his thick arms across his chest.

“Is this place still run by the Brotherhood?”

“See any Brothers?” She just continues to stare at him. Gendry runs a palm across his jaw. “Seven months back a band of Freys came through and put all the orphans to sword. By then, we hadn’t had a visit from any of the Brothers in near four months. Though Jeyne and I kept receiving ravens.”

She picks at the broken weapons on the work table. “Was this Jeyne carried off with the Freys?”

“Nah, they stuck around for bit. A big man knocked her head in ‘cause she wouldn’t stop crying when they took her.” The man had come down after he was done and sat with his men and made some jape about breaking their new toy. “I gelded him that night. He died a week later of infections, but by then the rest had moved on.”

“How’d you get away with it?” she asks.

Somehow it’s the question he expects, as if she’s testing him. He shrugs. “How could a big oaf like me get in unnoticed? They all assumed one of them had done it out of anger."

Arya hoists herself up onto the work bench. “Is the Brotherhood still around?”

“I still hear of ‘em from travelers, but we don’t get ravens from ‘em nowadays.”

“So the roads are still serviceable?”

“Only the Kingsroad.”

“Are there many travelers?” she asks. “And the armies; how quickly can the armies move? Has the river frozen?”

“What are you asking after?”

Gendry pushes off the anvil. “Where have you been these years? How are you here?”

Arya jumps down from the table, but Gendry grabs her before she can dart away. His hand closes around her arm. She pulls once then twists and grabs a tool in her left hand. How could he have forgotten? She’s left handed. Arya brings the point of a pair of pliers to his eye. They’re the thin set he uses to pull gems from the more elaborate helms and sword pommels.

“Does Beric Dondarrion still live?”

“No.”

Arya breaths heavily through her nose several times, but her hand stays steady. “Are you still a knight of Hollow Hill?”

Gendry’s gaze cannot leave the pliers. “No.”

“Who heads the Brotherhood now?”

“I don’t know,” he lies and releases her.

After a beat, Arya throws the pliers onto the workbench. This time when she turns to leave, Gendry doesn’t stop her.

He staggers around the anvil, pulls out the soldering rod, and upends the bucket of water on his head. He stays bent over, hands on his knees, and breathing hard for a long time. The door creaks again and Gendry moves to the fire where he’s left the hammer on the forge’s edge.

“Where do you keep it?”

“Keep what?” he snarls.

“Your wealth,” she says as if reminding him. “You’ve got it hoarded away somewhere.”

“I’ve never had a star to my name.”

“You’re not stupid, Gendry.” His chest catches at his name on her tongue. “You’re the only thing constant about this place and all of the patrons give you a wide berth. You’ve got power here.”

“I’ve got a set of hammers.”

“You have raw materials.” She points to the tin plate stacked in the rafters. “You’re making a profit off the war. And I’ve looked all over this inn and haven’t found your hoard, so it must be here.”

It is a task to not glance over at the barrel half-full of horseshoes. He forces himself to keep eye contact with her. “I can sometimes trade for what I need.”

“So stubborn.” Her gray eyes flick to his cot and the hooks above where his few shirts and other breeches hang. “Dig it out once everyone is in their cups tonight,” she tells him, looking back. “We need to leave before first light.”

“Who said I wanted to go.”

“You’re not of the Brotherhood, as you have just told me. You have no allegiance here.” She pauses then grabs the end of her braid and gives it a tug so the bells jingle. "No reason to stay.”

“Which is not the same as a reason to leave.”

“And if I gave you one?”

There is a desperation in her voice and Gendry can only see little Arya, freshly washed of Arry, wanting to go north, to find her brother at the Wall. To find her brother the King in the Riverlands.

“The North, I regret, holds nothings for you, Arya—“

“I need to go south. The North…”—he is compelled to step forward, but stops when she finds her voice again— "can wait. I must go south first.”

“Why?”

“I have to finish something.”

“That’s all the reason I get?”

“I cannot say more at present. Will you come?”

Gendry does look around his forge: his cot made-up with two pillows and the thickest and least itchy blankets stolen from the inn; the image of the Smith he welded together from scraps then nailed above to door; the row of helms he spent days repairing but would never show to lords of any standing. “As you said,” he says, looking back at her, “I have no reason to stay.”

An emotion dances across Arya’s features, darkening her eyes and causing her to frown. If Gendry is to name it, it is most akin to sadness. She turns for the door, but pauses. “Make sure to pack your hammers,” she says, not looking at him. “So they know you left and don’t waste time looking for a body.”


	2. Chapter 2

They walk their horses across the frozen bridge. Gendry doubts the beasts will last four days before succumbing to exhaustion. In fine weather, they’d be halfway to Kings Landing. At best, they’ll have covered a third of the leagues when they lose the horses. 

Behind him, Arya throws fervent glances over her shoulder, although anybody would have to be mad to be out of bed this early. A fine snow is falling and Gendry already misses the heat of his armory.

Once on the compact road again, Gendry swings himself up onto his horse. He adjusts himself, trying to find a more comfortable position. He’ll be saddlesore by midday. Arya sits high and loose in her saddle with her feet free of the stirrups. She she turns her gray mare to face the river one last time. The sluggish waters creak and groan with ice flows.

“Are there still rumors about that massive wolf pack?” she asks.

“A sell-sword came through last week with a tale about the devil she-wolf and her demon pups. He said they ate an entire legion.” Gendry kicks his horse into a trot. 

He rides for a time alone until she catches up with him. Still, even after several leagues she turns in her saddle to look behind them as if convinced they’re traveling the wrong way. Each time she does, Gendry glances to look at her, drawn by the aggravated upset of so many bells. He wants to ask about them. The Arya he knew never cared for jewelry. The only bit of metal to matter was her slim, castle-forged blade. She still has the thin, needle like sword, although now it resembled more of a stiletto she could hide with some ease up her sleeve.

As the sun climbs higher than a fist above the horizon, Gendry is nearly asleep in his saddle. They settled on a steady gait needing to put as much distance between them and the inn but unable to overtax the horses. The steady clop of hooves mixed with the rhythmic dance of the bells lulls Gendry like a half-remembered hymn.

When they stop to water the horses and eat the hard cheese and bread they stole from the larder, Gendry catches himself starring at her braid. It is a wild and matted thing and long enough to brush the seat of her saddle. The bells decorate every inch of it. Bells of many sizes and of every metal. Bells which are green and orange from corrosion and rust. 

“What?” she snaps.

He looks away. “You seem strange with long hair.”

By the third night the bells are driving him mad. They jingle with every step she takes. He can’t sleep from how oftener she stirs next to him under the furs. 

They find an abandoned farmstead to shelter in for the night. They drag the large straw mattress from the bed frame and spread the contents out in a small room off the main living area. It takes some convincing, but they get the horses in and secured. At the hearth, Gendry is building up the fire as Arya skins a pair of white hares she shot neatly through the neck with her bow.

He watches her pierce the hares on spits then stand and bring them over to the fire. He takes them from her and settles them over the flames.

“Do you want to keep the skins for tanning?” she asks.

“You didn’t remove the brains, did you?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t be curin' any hides.”

“You're in a mood,” she says and goes back to the discarded skins. 

He scrubs at his face. “I haven't slept these past nights.”

“You too good to sleep on the ground, Ser Knight?” In the far corner, there’s a door to the cellar set into the floor. Arya opens this and drops the skins inside.

“The ground ain’t the problem, m’lady. You route around like a piglet after acorns.”

The cellar door drops shut with a bang. “I do not."

“You move the whole night. And the bells! How are you not deaf? It’s like being trapped in a sept on a holy day.”

She reaches to touch one then drops her hand as if catching herself. “They are not so loud.”

Gendry turns back to the fire and flips the hares. The fat drips causing the flames to spit and hiss. His stomach growls in anticipation. “The closer we get to King’s Landing, the more careful we’ll need to be.”

“I know.” Her annoyance jabs at him because it’s still so familiar.

“You should remove them,” he says evenly. “The bells." Arya objects at once, but he pushes the suggestion, protesting against their sound. “We can’t draw attention to ourselves. Least of all you.”

Arya fixes him with her sharp eyes. “I earned them,” she says fiercely. “Each, single one.”

Gendry does not understand, but she doesn't explain and he cannot bring himself to draw the answers out. He yields and let’s the topic die. It’s a week or more before they reach the capital. In time she’ll see his logic.

The hares finish cooking. They tear into the hot meat, burning the tips of their tongues, and drink from a shared wineskin. Fat, grease, and wine stain the corners of their mouths. Gendry breaks the largest bones open to get at the marrow. Arya unabashedly licks and sucks each of her fingers clean. And when she catches him staring, she holds his gaze like it’s a challenge as she finishes. His cock twitches at the sight and he has to look away.

He’s still thinking about it hours later under the furs. He drank more wine than he should have in hopes it would help him sleep tonight. Now his head is swimming and his cock is pushing against his breeches and Arya’s squirming next to him and the bells seem to laugh at his luck. It’s not only that she moves and the bells put him on edge, but Arya... doesn’t talk so much as grunts—growls in her sleep. They are low and guttural and carnal and—

Gendry puts a hand to himself. Seven Hells. He’ll never survive the journey; not with the mocking bells every minute and her arse pushing against his thigh every night.

* * *

The gray mare dies early on the fifth day. Gendry is asleep in his saddle when it happens, his horse dutifully following the road. It’s the bells that wake him not Arya’s raised voice or his own horse’s whinnies. But the broken pattern of the bells. Gendry jerks awake and pulls his brown up short.

The gray staggers, takes a final unsteady step, and collapses. Arya is pitched from the saddle, landing hard in the snow. He jumps down and races to her, but she is already moving. Gendry hauls her to her feet.

The horse is screaming. Her wide eyes are roving in the sockets. The hind legs try again and again to find purchase on the muddy terrain. It is clear she will never stand again. The horse rocks again and smacks its head against the earth. Arya shoots forward. She puts a knee to the mare’s head, covers her eye with her palm, and pulls a knife from her belt. The labored breathing of the horse rocks her as she leans over, whispers something Gendry doesn’t understand, then pulls the blade through the tendons of the throat.

The blood steams in the morning air.

Arya wipes the blade clean on the beast’s forelock then stands. Instead of sheathing it, she extends it to him, handle first. She looks at him when he doesn’t take it.

“This is like to be our last taste of fresh meat now that we’re in the Crownlands.”

He takes the knife.

“What we don’t eat tonight, we can sell. We need the gold.”

Gendry walks around the dead horse. His own is back down the path, pulling bark from a tree. “I’ve got plenty of coin to get us to King’s Landing.”

“We’re not going to King’s Landing.”

Gendry blinks. “You said—“

“South.”

“We’re taking the damned Kingsroad.”

"The only serviceable road. It is not my fault you supplied your own destination. But I assume the allure of home.”

Gendry points at her with the knife. “King’s Landing is not my home. Bastards don’t have homes.”

She flinches and Gendry hates himself. He may never have had a home, but it’s saved him from the ache of ever losing one. Or the family that tends to reside inside.

Too stubborn and angry to apologize, he sheds his cloak, hanging it in a nearby tree then opens his thick, wool lined coat and sinks to his haunches. The knife in his hand is sharp. He splits open the beast’s belly with little effort and begins to remove the organs. She watches him for a while then leaves to see to his horse, a fire, and camp for that night.

By the time the task is done, Gendry is shirtless, bloody up to his elbows, and can’t feel much beneath his knees. He straightens and stretches, joints popping in protest. The ground is too hard to bury the carcass, so he has pulled the mess several leagues downwind of their location for the wolves and foxes to find. The sun is low and now that he has stopped working he can feel the bite in the air as he trudges back up the road.

Arya retrieves him, slipping her small hand around his upper arm and pulling him towards their camp set back deep in the wood. The best cuts of horse meat are already on spits over the fire. The rest is wrapped in the now extra saddle blanket. He sits at the fire and Arya brings him a bucket of melted snow to wash with. When he’s done she’s ready with a dry tunic and jerkin and his coat. He’s only push his arms through the sleeves when she presses a warm cup of broth into his hands, and he thinks she’s trying to make up for lying to him about their destination. 

“I can take of my own boots,” he objects when she starts on his laces.

She ignores him and tells him to finish his broth. It’s good, with bits of meat and root vegetables made soft from stewing all day. He can feel it snaking down into his core, spreading out behind his lungs.

“Done?” she asks. When he nods, she takes the cup form him. “Now get your trousers off.”

“Pardon?”

“They’re caked in mud. If we don’t get ‘em off they’re like to freeze to you.” She reaches for him, but he bats away her hand. “Oh, go in the tent then if you’re going to be such a maid.”

He bristles. "You just want a look at my cock."

Arya sets a hand on her hip and laughs. "I’ve seen cocks before. I should doubt yours looks any different.”

"How many cocks?” His eyes lift to the bells.

"More than the number of cunts you have. Now,” she sighs, "will you take them off? Unless you want to lose your cock to frost.”

He stands and starts on his laces. The packed snow underfoot is slippery. She comes around to keep him steady, but it’s of little help.

“Here then,” she says, holding open the tent’s flap. “Quick before the all heat escapes.”

He sits down on the stacked furs with his feet still out in the snow and, leaning back, squirms out of his breeches. With a final grunt, he pushes the bunched fabric past his knees and tosses them out.

“Smallclothes,” she says.

Gendry makes an exacerbated sound as her hand slips through the tent’s flap. Cursing and muttering to himself, he unknots them and passes them off as well.

“Just stay in there and get warm,” she calls.

Gendry quickly covers himself with his hands incase she means to enter, but she doesn’t. “I’ll bring you some food after I get these staked by the fire.”

She’s made proper work of the tent. It’s a canvas one originally part of a soldier’s kit. Although now the fabric is so soiled and faded that the sigil can’t be properly distinguished. They’ve yet to use it this trip, for which Gendry is thankful as it’s meant for a single man and having to share such a tight space is like to kill him.

He pulls his pack to him and starts to dig for fresh clothing. Arya’s hung a lamp low enough to not to be a fire hazard but high enough they can’t knock it with their heads. For such a little flame it’s done a fair job of warming the space. He’s just knotting his breeches when Arya enters without warning. She hands him a spit, the end wrapped to protect from the heat.

The meat is dark, distinctly red, and still surprisingly tender. The taste is almost akin to venison, gamey and slightly sweet. Gendry finds a wineskin and drinks heavily from it before passing it to her. Arya takes large, greedy bites of the meat, pulling it free with a quick tug that rattles the bells. She shakes her head to the wine and Gendry brings the skin to his lips again.

Horse meat has become more common with winter. With stews and pies you hope for horse but most often it’s rat. Some of the meals Jym and previous innkeepers have made remind Gendry of the thick bowls of brown served in Flea’s Bottom. Even then he knew it was mostly grease and bits of pigeon with a few potato lumps, but it hadn’t bothered him. With horse meat, he’s never quite able to forget the animal it was. Not in the way he does with pig or goat. He tells her as much.

"In the far east,” Arya says with her mouth full, "horse is the most prized meat. And some free cities considered it a delicacy.”

“East,” he says, mulling over the word as he would a nearly finished piece of work, looking for flaws. "Is that then where you truly were? Where you went and hid? In Essos?”

Arya asks for the wine. Gendry watches her mouth wrap around the horn spout, how the muscles of her throat swallow the liquid down. “Yes,” she answers. “For a time.”

He nods, but his brow crumples in confusion. “When did you—?"

“Before,” she interrupts, “I only meant I can understand wanting to return to something familiar, to something from your childhood.” Her eyes are fixed on the tent’s floor.

Gendry wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "A childhood is something only little lords and ladies have,” he tells her, not unkindly. "I grew up in a forge. All forges are the same.”

Arya rips another bite of meat from her spit. She chews and pulls at the wineskin again with her mouth still half full. “Simple then. Just simplicity. Life before all of this?” She’s near shouting at him. A flush spreads across her neck and the tops of her ears. “Don’t you want for anything?”

He cannot hold her stare. “Yes,” he admits as if it pains him. Gendry was raised on want: the ache for his mother, whom he cannot accurately recall; the imaginings of his father, a gallant knight who died in the rebellion or a sexton too enraptured by his mother’s yellow hair; the desire to make Tobho Mott proud of him; the distant imagining of a shop of very own. Gendry has always wanted what cannot be, what he cannot have. Want has led him wrong before, an aspect of the Stranger he cannot ignore.

Gendry opens his mouth to apologize or to explain or to raise his voice against her; he doesn’t not know which.

“I’ll take the first watch.” Before he can call to her, Arya has already slipped from the tent. 

He does not think it’s necessary. They've only come across one traveller in the previous days, and he was quick to avoid them as they were him. And it is too cold for her to sit out there even with a fire. Truth be told, she is rather rubbish at building them. They are bright, but never hot enough for Gendry’s satisfaction.

Instead of following her out, persuading her that the crunch of snow and the horse would give them plenty of warning of anybody daft enough to be roving about, Gendry finishes the horse meat and the wine. With a full stomach, a loose head, and the tent’s warmth, he burrows in the furs and sleeps.

He wakes with a start. It’s unclear what has woken him. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and listens. The wind is blowing, pressing at the canvas sides of the tent and causing the lamp, still lit, to sway slightly. He hears a soft, patterned crackling sound that can only be the fire and nothing else. After another minute, Gendry is satisfied and sinks back into the furs.

It is only then that he notices he shares them. At some point, Arya gave up on her watch and did not bother to wake him. As he settles onto his side, cradling his arm under his head, he wonders how she managed to do so without making a sound, without a ring from her bells.

He is hovering at the threshold of sleep, anxious to return, when she moves. Her whole body gives a violent shutter The sharp jerk of her head is accompanied by soft tinkling. He holds himself still to see if she wakes.

Arya shifts and squirms. Her brows pucker. She makes muted, plaintive noises that prick Gendry like the spurs of camp-follower weeds. 

She must be dreaming, he thinks. Unpleasant things, memories, because who has liberty to dream of something pleasing? Tentatively he reaches forward to wake her. It is ill luck to break a man from his dream: for if it is a bad one, he will suffer a worse fate; if a good one, it shall never come to pass. But he cannot think of leaving her to distress.

Arya thrashes, her legs kicking out. One of her heels collides painfully with his shin. A whimper escapes her lips.

He acts, rolling forward and wrapping an arm around her. He shakes her once, hard. “Arya.”

She wakes with a gasp like breaking through water. Her nails find his arm and press with such force he’ll have welts. Even in the dim light he can see how wide but focused her eye are.

“It’s me,” he says and repeats it. “It’s just me.”

She nods once. Her nails ease from his skin, but she doesn’t release his arm. He watches her forcibly pull several deep breaths through her nose. Her gray eyes seem to track something he cannot see.

After a minute, her gaze falls on him. “Was I routing again?” she asks.

He blinks once, twice, and recovers. “Like…like a piglet.” Gendry frowns, studying her face. “Go back to sleep,” he coaxes. 

She nods again, wipes at her eyes, then lets her hand return to his forearm as she settles on her side.

He wants to comfort her, to offer some words that sooth as a salve might. It is not a skill he’s learned. And he thinks, Arya is easy to laugh with, but not always to talk with. So perhaps, in this instance, it is right not to talk.

Perhaps being here, beside her, is enough. 

Her fingers are soft and light on his skin. He wonders if his arm feels heavy where it rests in the dip of her waist. Can she feel his heart labor in his chest the same way he senses her hair catching in his beard?

“It was the dream again,” she says so softly he almost doesn’t hear it over the flex of the canvas and wind. “The wolf dream.”

“Just sleep,” he says, but uncertain if the words are intended more for her or himself.


End file.
